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Sham bam bamina! posted:Fallout: Equestria has several comparably long spinoff fanfictions of itself. I was talking about Fallout Equestria. The only other MLP/Fallout fanfiction I know is Project Horizons, which was a fix fic by an author who thought the main character of Fallout Equestria was too powerful, too nice, and didn't get punished and/or subjected to sexual menace enough.
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Feb 2, 2021 04:42
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Only tangentially related to the topic but I remember a terrible book I read in the early 90's that was 100% a Dungeons and Dragons fanfic book. It started out with a group of friends meeting to play an adventure game that was totally not dungeons and dragons and their I had never even played DnD and I knew exactly what system they were knocking off of. What really killed me was in the end there was a 'Thank you' section where he thanked a friend for helping him to come up with the game system used in the books. It really took two people to say 'What if DnD but with letters instead of numbers?'. I think it was semi popular in the nerd groups at the time so I hope someone recognizes it from the crappy description I just gave.
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Feb 2, 2021 11:57
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IShallRiseAgain posted:I haven't read it myself, but I found multiple people mentioning it actually follows Dungeons and Dragons mechanics, so its not just a book in the dungeon and dragons settings. Kind of, in that the characters wear dice bracelets that they can feel rolling for what are very clearly (to the reader) encounters/saving rolls etc. But it doesn't have the... gaming the game feeling I think's essential for a LitRPG - the closest they come to exploiting the rules and using any metaknowledge of the system is trying to psychically influence the dice rolls on the general principle of "higher is better". (They're all D&D players IRL, but they're also pretty much amnesiacs in RPGworld - occasional flashes of memory that don't do anything for plot or character or useful knowledge.) So it is kiiind of a proto-LitRPG, depending on your definition, but... not really.
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Feb 2, 2021 12:08
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Darkhold posted:Only tangentially related to the topic but I remember a terrible book I read in the early 90's that was 100% a Dungeons and Dragons fanfic book. It started out with a group of friends meeting to play an adventure game that was totally not dungeons and dragons and their Was that the one where both women in the group get gang raped by slavers immediately on arrival and one of them's left catatonic? Joel Rosenberg, The Sleeping Dragon then. Well, I say one, but I bet that describes plenty more than one.
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Feb 2, 2021 12:23
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Gats Akimbo posted:Was that the one where both women in the group get gang raped by slavers immediately on arrival and one of them's left catatonic? Joel Rosenberg, The Sleeping Dragon then. EDIT: well I did just get some amusement as he apparently shares the same name as some Tom Clancy style author and half of the bad reviews are 'uh this is quite a different book than I was expecting'. Darkhold has a new favorite as of 12:37 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 12:30
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I mean, D&D was cribbed whole from Tolkein and the like and people cribbing from D&D didn't stop others from cribbing from Tolkein and his imitators instead. It was more cribbed from Leiber and Vance. Gygax hated Tolkien and only included elves and dwarves under duress, because his players made him. Tom Bombadil was his favorite character for the extremely dumb reason that he could beat up Sauron 
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Feb 2, 2021 13:18
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IShallRiseAgain posted:I haven't read it myself, but I found multiple people mentioning it actually follows Dungeons and Dragons mechanics, so its not just a book in the dungeon and dragons settings. There's lots of books that are novelizations of the author's tabletop games with the dice rolls filed off, and in a lot of those if you're familiar with the system you can see how everything that happens "works", mechanically, even if the author never explicitly details it. I read one series (set in an RPG the author had worked on sourcebooks for in the past) where it was quite explicit that the RPG mechanics were the actual physics of the world, not an abstraction -- and that the people in the setting had studied and largely understood those mechanics. So, for example, there is a Being A Roving Adventurer university major, and one of the first assignments is "learn some basic defensive spells that require all of the spell paths, even if they're uselessly weak, and cast them every time you leave the city to exercise your spellcasting organ". I don't think any of these are LitRPG, though, because in none of them are the mechanics the point; to take the above example, the "learn Noob's Ward and cast it repeatedly to level up your spellcasting" is a one-sentence aside in a chapter otherwise about the protagonist trying to balance their own priorities (make friends, get laid, eat good food, don't flunk out) with their parents' (study advanced magic, join the family enchanting business after you graduate) and their new job's (do a minor in Adventuring because this job will require leaving the city and interacting with monsters, albeit hopefully in a non-combat role), rather than a chapter about them grinding until they can cast Bigby's Crushing Tactical Nuke or something. A lot of these books are quite bad (I remember really enjoying Dragonlance when I was like 12 but I suspect I would find it unreadable now), but they're bad in different ways; I think if you can remove the allusions to game mechanics without removing the story (indeed, if you can describe it as "allusions to" rather than "the bulk of the text") it's probably not a litRPG.
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Feb 2, 2021 15:21
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Darkhold posted:Only tangentially related to the topic but I remember a terrible book I read in the early 90's that was 100% a Dungeons and Dragons fanfic book. It started out with a group of friends meeting to play an adventure game that was totally not dungeons and dragons and their Ah, yes, the Guardians of the Flame series. (What flame they were guarding, I never did figure out.) The ostensible hero ends up adopting a little girl, and several books later, after a time skip, one of the other party members starts loving her when she's a young woman.
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Feb 2, 2021 15:22
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If Fallout Equestria is genuinely the longest single continuous work of English fiction, why isn't there a Wikipedia page for it?
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Feb 3, 2021 10:02
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I'm pretty sure Wikipedia has seen extensive edit wars about just that, and other really long fanfics, on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels Also, another list of interest to this thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_considered_the_worst quote:Worlds of Power: Metal Gear (Alexander Frost, 1990): a novelisation of the 1987 video game Metal Gear, it was described as possibly the worst book ever written by Den of Geek's Luke McKinney: "This must have been a secret plot by Nintendo of America to destroy any interest in reading which may have lurked within loyal players. And this book is so bad it might cause your brain to forget how to read in self-defense."[50] quote:Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars (Boris Johnson, 2007): a collection of Johnson's motoring columns written for GQ. Writing for The New European, Nick Holland called it "the worst motoring book ever written, possibly […] the worst book ever written."[74] The book was criticised for "chauvinistic and racist comments."[75][76] Website Carkeys.co.uk called Johnson "the world’s worst car journalist."[77] SerialKilldeer has a new favorite as of 16:28 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 16:06
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I've always loved that page's inclusion of the Metal Gear book as if anyone before or after Den of Geek's Luke McKinney has given a single poo poo about it or that it's somehow "the bad one" out of an entire line of NES tie-in chapter books.
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Feb 3, 2021 17:36
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I've always loved that page's inclusion of the Metal Gear book as if anyone before or after Den of Geek's Luke McKinney has given a single poo poo about it or that it's somehow "the bad one" out of an entire line of NES tie-in chapter books.
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Feb 3, 2021 18:17
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The MGS2 novel plays it disappointingly straight, just word for word retells the game.
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Feb 3, 2021 18:29
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Oooh, okay. It turns out isekai is even creepier when it doesn't have the excuse of being literal fanfiction where you try to keep Yamcha relevant into Dragon Ball Z, or just get a harem of fantasy women who are inexplicably attracted to you and you're too socially inept to actually gently caress. Isekai isn't really what is being talked about. LitRPG is a very specific thing that's distinct from Isekai, even though it does share DNA. Unfortunately Isekai recently has become the Popular Thing so there's a lot of it being written and as usual a lot of it is straight garbage. But Isekai doesn't require anything more than finding yourself in another world. The original Isekai would be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, as far as I know. The original JAPANESE Isekai was Aura Battler Dunbine, which doesn't really have any of the 'harem of hot women' or 'gotta kill them all for leveling' from LitRPG. It's just about a Japanese teenager who gets summoned by a fantasy warlord to pilot one of his mecha build by an American the warlord he had summoned and the teenager immediately being drawn into a huge fantasy world war where everyone fighting gets exiled to Earth by the fairy queen and everyone dies in battle except for the American army aiding the heroic fantasy warriors and the protagonist's fairy partner. Sadly the garbage got popular with a Tenchi spinoff and which also inspired all the bad Japanese LitRPG. Senior Woodchuck posted:Ah, yes, the Guardians of the Flame series. (What flame they were guarding, I never did figure out.) The ostensible hero ends up adopting a little girl, and several books later, after a time skip, one of the other party members starts loving her when she's a young woman. Huh this title sounds familiar and it's terrible you say? Let me se--- Wikipedia posted:The Baen Books omnibus editions Ah. Also, lol: Wikipedia posted:The Flame Kchama has a new favorite as of 19:11 on Feb 3, 2021 |
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Feb 3, 2021 19:07
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Kchama posted:The original Isekai would be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, as far as I know. I'd put the concept back to 1666 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blazing_World quote:As its full title suggests, Blazing World is a fanciful depiction of a satirical, utopian kingdom in another world (with different stars in the sky) that can be reached via the North Pole. [...] It is terrible, but terrible in the fascinating outsider art way rather than the generic terrible way.
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Feb 3, 2021 19:57
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Gats Akimbo posted:I'd put the concept back to 1666 at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blazing_World Huh, that's very interesting to know. It's one of those things you don't expect to be super ancient, but 1666 would prove me wrong.
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Feb 3, 2021 20:02
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Yeah portal fantasy has been a thing for basically forever; isekai is just the newest variation of it. 'What would a person from the normal world do in this' is a really easy jumping off point.
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Feb 3, 2021 20:57
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neongrey posted:Yeah portal fantasy has been a thing for basically forever; isekai is just the newest variation of it. 'What would a person from the normal world do in this' is a really easy jumping off point. It's a shame 95% of the answers seem to be "they'd be better than everyone else in every conceivable way"
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Feb 3, 2021 22:01
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Qwertycoatl posted:It's a shame 95% of the answers seem to be "they'd be better than everyone else in every conceivable way" I've seen some interesting ones lately. Probably the most interesting one was about a middle-aged woman who was reincarnated with her memories, and grew up in the house of very low-ranking nobility and she has no real skills either way so she used the one ability she could use from her past life to survive: she became someone that high-ranking noblewomen could vent out all the frustrations of their life onto, and could accept the physical and verbal that went with it, because in exchange she received protection and expensive gifts. And so the story was how she maneuvered through society as a pet for the upper class.
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Feb 3, 2021 22:17
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Kchama posted:Huh, that's very interesting to know. It's one of those things you don't expect to be super ancient, but 1666 would prove me wrong. There are examples going all the way back to truly ancient literature of heroes traveling to/being transported to other worlds or realms and having adventures.
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Feb 3, 2021 23:09
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Captain Monkey posted:There are examples going all the way back to truly ancient literature of heroes traveling to/being transported to other worlds or realms and having adventures. I mean yeah that's a given, but the Isekai genre does have its specific tropes that distinguish it from just any "We went to another world" story.
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Feb 3, 2021 23:43
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Kchama posted:Huh, that's very interesting to know. It's one of those things you don't expect to be super ancient, but 1666 would prove me wrong. It even gets meta; the protagonist explains how she's going to employ the author to write the very book you hold in your hands! It's awesome and stupid and wonderful and I love it. Captain Monkey posted:There are examples going all the way back to truly ancient literature of heroes traveling to/being transported to other worlds or realms and having adventures. Enoch ascending through the Heavens, Dante travelling through Hell/Purgatory/Heaven, Irish immrama, various gods/goddesses/heroes going to Hell - all the ones I can think of are journeys, though, rather than "go to place, hang around there and do stuff", which seems different to me, though I may be kidding myself. Or forgetting something really obvious and embarrassing.
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Feb 4, 2021 00:27
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How about True Story?
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Feb 4, 2021 01:53
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Tunicate posted:How about True Story? You mean by Lucian?
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Feb 4, 2021 03:03
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True Story starts with him getting blown off course by a storm doesn't it? I guess the question is what makes isekai different from the Odyssey? Is it's defining element travelogue to weird place, is it the instant teleportation to a different world rather than having journey there (important since the concept of the journey is so trope-heavy, skipping that element does have big implications for genre.) Is it just the self-awareness, the meta aspect? Odysseus isn't that phased by oceans full of monsters or trips into the underworld because the audience knows that's hero poo poo, whereas the main character waking up in an RPG world is going to know their identity an lived experiences don't fit in that world.
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Feb 4, 2021 08:18
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he also goes up in a tornado to
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Feb 4, 2021 08:23
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Odysseus is traveling in his own world
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Feb 4, 2021 13:30
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Carthag Tuek posted:Odysseus is traveling in his own world There are isekai that are in the past as well. Really all you need for an isekai is a world that is unfamiliar which in the ancient world going to a different country was enough for that
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Feb 4, 2021 14:12
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Odysseus is traveling in his own world in his own time
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Feb 4, 2021 14:23
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Do you have a point or are you stuck in a loop Because that doesn’t change anything as I said in the post I assume your responding to
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Feb 4, 2021 14:24
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Comparison comes to mind- is Gulliver's Travels isekai?
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Feb 4, 2021 14:27
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I think the actual isekai genre needs there to be some element of not being able to go back home. A lot of them start with the protagonist literally dying and being reincarnated in another world. More about making a new life in the fantasy world than just going there and learning lessons. Visiting other worlds is Hero's Journey stuff that's as old as storytelling itself.
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Feb 4, 2021 14:37
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Divine Comedy is an isekai
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Feb 4, 2021 14:59
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Odysseus is fanfiction.
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Feb 4, 2021 15:45
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Isn't Isekai the name of the website where you can find out info on estranged parents and their world views
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Feb 4, 2021 16:28
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Sisal Two-Step posted:Isn't Isekai the name of the website where you can find out info on estranged parents and their world views Issendai.
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Feb 4, 2021 16:29
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Tunicate posted:How about True Story? I think that's more a journey-with-tourism than a make-a-life-in-new-world, but there's probably a lot of boundary-blurring in those categories. I don't know enough about isekai to know how much of it fits into one category or the other.
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Feb 4, 2021 16:40
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Tenebrais posted:I think the actual isekai genre needs there to be some element of not being able to go back home. A lot of them start with the protagonist literally dying and being reincarnated in another world. More about making a new life in the fantasy world than just going there and learning lessons. Yeah, that makes sense. The whole point is specifically going all-in on the new world they're in and making the most of it from their unique perspective, not any hope of returning home. Probably appeals a lot as escapist fiction to an audience that doesn't have anything worthwhile waiting for them in the 'real' world. (an increasingly sympathetic viewpoint, I wager)
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Feb 4, 2021 16:50
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None of those are isekai because they aren't naked power fantasies in which the other world exists to be exploited by the protagonist.
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Feb 4, 2021 17:34
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Sham bam bamina! posted:None of those are isekai because they aren't naked power fantasies in which the other world exists to be exploited by the protagonist. Hey the naked power fantasy isn’t a pre-requisite, it’s just unfortunately extremely common
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Feb 4, 2021 17:37
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